


Silver and Gold

by Anti_kate



Series: Without the Pleasure of a Scar [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 31 Days of Ineffables Advent Calendar Challenge 2019 (Good Omens), Angst, Christmas Truce 1914, Crowley is a pine tree, Homophobia, M/M, Mention of Death, No Betas We Fall Like Crowley, Pretty grim stuff actually, Sad bastard club, WW1, mention of war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 19:54:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21944236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anti_kate/pseuds/Anti_kate
Summary: Aziraphale. You must know I am not responsible for this - it’s all their own work. I’m not even doing anything properly demonic, I’m just watching them die like flies. I hope you’re safe. I hope you think of me, as often as I do of you. No, that’s a lie. I hope you are consumed by your thoughts of me, and I hope you never think of me at all. I hope you regret every wasted minute, and I hope you don’t care at all....An angel and a demon in the trenches of WW1.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Without the Pleasure of a Scar [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1636696
Comments: 51
Kudos: 161





	Silver and Gold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [racketghost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/racketghost/gifts).



> I fell off the Christmas Advent Calendar wagon due to life and busyness, but this one was kicking around in my brain after I read Racketghost’s unbelievably good Strange Moons series. 
> 
> Anyway, please heed the tags - this one is pretty dark, and while nothing truly awful happens, it is set in WW1 and makes mention of period-typical violence and homophobia.
> 
> Apologies for all and any historical inaccuracies.

**December 25th, 1914. The Western Front.**

Crowley lit the cigarette with the tip of his finger, ignoring the sting of hellfire in favour of the quick buzz of the nicotine. It was eerily quiet in the predawn light.

He’d had a cigarette lighter, but he’d lost it somewhere a few weeks ago, and it turned out demonic miracles couldn’t fix everything. He knew that, already, of course. There were limits to his powers, things that once lost were irretrievable. Things that once broken were unfixable.

He’d liked the lighter. It had been a gift, a real object, not something miracled or conjured. It had been fashioned from both silver and gold - most of it silver, but for the motif of a golden serpent on one side. It had fit nicely in his hand, but wasn’t too weighty to drag down a pocket. Someone human had made it with their hands and fiddly little tools, a silversmith somewhere in Paris, perhaps, leaning over a workbench, paying attention to all the tiniest details, the scales on the serpent’s back, the ovoid curve of it, the rasp of the lighting mechanism.

And then someone not-so-human had seen it, in a shop window perhaps, and walked in, and asked to take a closer look. That same someone had held it in his hand, and smoothed his fingers over it while he thought of Crowley, and then he’d had even asked to have a small message inscribed in its base.

“To C from A.”

It wasn’t much of a message. It was, if anything, the sort of message that should have made Crowley burn with rage. So brief and cool and almost dismissive. But then, what sort of fool would leave evidence around, even something as inconsequential as a cigarette lighter? And this was the closest thing to evidence the angel had ever given him.

The lighter had been delivered to his flat a few years back, in a small red, satin-lined gift box. It hadn’t been Aziraphale’s first attempt at contacting him since Crowley had asked for the holy water, but it had been the only time he’d sent a physical object. It was, in fact, the only time Crowley could recall the angel ever giving him anything. Beyond tedious lectures or sanctimonious scoldings, of course. No that wasn’t true, but it was something he liked to tell himself, that he was better off without the scolding and the huffed sighs and the denial.

Crowley had almost crushed the whole box beneath his foot when the delivery boy had dropped it off, but then he hadn’t, and then he’d opened the box, and then he’d started carrying the lighter with him, and then he’d had it in his pocket for years. And now it was gone.

The shelling had stopped an hour or so ago, and now there was nothing but the sounds of men moving in the boggy trenches and the groaning coming from poor Smith. The field medics had given up on him, pumped him full of morphine but he was still in agony. Crowley was waiting until they’d moved on before he went down.

He was getting used to it, after five months. _(Only five bloody months. It felt like a thousand years.)_ He couldn’t heal every poor bastard, because that wasn’t the sort of miracle downstairs liked very much. But he could do the odd one here or there.

He smoked the cigarette down to the very end, and then loped down to where Smith lay dying in the RAP*, his lower half a mangle of red, his face ghastly white. He’d been hit by a whizz-bang before the shelling had stopped.

Crowley liked Smith. Liking people was always a mistake, but even more so these days. Liking people had always meant watching them die and liking people now meant watching them die horrible, painful deaths, or watching them go over the top into no-man’s-land, and then never coming back. So he tried his hardest not to like anyone, but sometimes it happened anyway.

Smith had a quiet manner and a clear, direct gaze. A softish kind of face. Light blue eyes and pale hair, which wasn’t the reason Crowley liked him but was perhaps the reason he’d let himself crack open a bit when they’d talked. _You remind me of home,_ he’d thought but hadn’t said. There wasn’t much of a resemblance there beyond the colouring and the softness, not really, just a hint. He hadn’t even really noticed it until one night a few weeks before, when the company had been sitting in what passed for the mess, playing cards, writing letters, telling dirty jokes, talking about girlfriends and wives back home, and drinking horrible tea.

Crowley had been trying to write, and failing. He’d tried numerous times over the past half-century, and never managed more than a few lines. This time, he’d written only “A” on the top of the paper, and then sat staring at it. He wasn’t even sure what he wanted to write.

_Aziraphale. You must know I am not responsible for this - it’s all their own work. I’m not even doing anything properly demonic, I’m just watching them die like flies. I hope you’re safe. I hope you think of me, as often as I do of you. No, that’s a lie. I hope you are consumed by your thoughts of me, and I hope you never think of me at all. I hope you regret every wasted minute, and I hope you don’t care at all._

Instead, he twiddled the pencil, and drummed his fingers on the table.

“Who are you writing to then, Crowley?” said Dicky over his shoulder.

“None of your business,” Crowley had replied, covering the paper, even though he’d written nothing.

“You won’t get anything out of him, he’s a close-mouthed bastard,” one of the other men yelled.

“It’s an A, boys. His girlfriend’s name starts with an A. What do you think it stands for? Annie? Angela? Angelique? Got yourself a French sweetheart, Crowley?” Dicky was the sort of dull bully the British public school system excelled at producing, and the only surprise of it was that he was in the infantry, and hadn’t ended up an officer. Too stupid to be an officer was a very special sort of stupid, and Dicky had been killed by friendly fire not long after.

“Or is it Archie, or Andy?” Dicky had sneered then, still very much alive, and very much a pillock.

“Fuck off, Dicky,” Crowley said mildly, folding the paper and stuffing it in his pocket. He’d looked up and seen Smith looking at him, then. At first he misread it as interest, and had considered seeking him out in the darkness later, to lose himself in a hot mouth and sliding hands and a quick release. Even though it was probably, definitely, a terrible idea. _Any port in a storm._

But one night, a few weeks later, when the shelling was particularly bad, Smith had told him about “his” Robbie, and how he had been stationed in North Africa, and how he hadn’t heard from him in three months. Not that long, but long enough.

“What about you?” He’d asked Crowley. “Any _particular_ friends at home?”

Crowley had shifted uncomfortably, and sucked on his cigarette. “Yeah, there is. But you know how it is. It’s not simple. And there’s no future in it.” But there was a future coming whether he wanted it or not. A future where it didn’t matter who won whatever ridiculous game they were all playing, because either way, Crowley was holding a losing hand. Which was something Aziraphale should understand, but apparently didn’t.

Smith had given a bitter little laugh. “Course not. Not for us. Robbie’s got a girl he’s going to marry when he gets back. Says I should find one too.”

Now Crowley looked at Smith’s waxy face in the grey washed out light and put a hand on his shoulder. His eyes cleared, and focused on Crowley’s face.

“Got a letter,” he gasped, clutching his chest. “For Robbie. Would you?”

“You can send it yourself,” Crowley said. He wasn’t made for comfort or kindness, though over the millennia he’d learned how to offer spoonfuls of both, in small hidden gestures, always casting careful glances behind him. He took the man’s hand, and let the power run through his fingers.

It was only a small miracle, but it saved Smith’s life. Crowley would no doubt hear about it in his next review, and have to come up with some excuse as to why he’d done it. He’d think about it later.

For a moment he saw a ragged black cloak in the corner of his eye, a skeletal figure, a hooded head inclined towards him, one professional to another, and then he was gone. He didn’t get this one, not today, but he was always here, stalking the battlefields silently. Crowley ignored him. They had no business with each other, and even when Crowley’s own existence was over, he knew _he_ wouldn’t be in attendance.

He saw the other ones too, sometimes. The red-haired woman most often, but he’d seen enough battlefields to know that where war went, so too famine and pestilence would soon follow.

Smith slept then, and he sat beside him in the grim little room that smelled of blood and death as the light grew stronger outside. The firing hadn’t started up again, and he could hear men talking. Someone was telling them to come and get their tea, which was topped up with their rum ration first thing.

They were talking about food, which was pretty much a constant topic of conversation. They were well enough fed but it wasn’t good food, even Crowley could tell that, and he only ate recreationally.

“We always have turkey with cranberry sauce,” he heard one of the boys say, “and plum pudding, and Yorkshire pudding. Every year.”

“Turkey! We had nowt but rabbit,” another one laughed.

Turkey, he thought vaguely, with cranberry sauce. Sounded like something Aziraphale would like - rich meat with a tart sauce. He tried to remember the last thing he’d eaten with the angel, and couldn’t. Only five months in, and he felt so tired.

Somewhere further away, he heard singing. In German, sounded like. And there was yelling, but it wasn’t the panicked screaming he was used to. There was even laughing.

“Merry Christmas,” someone else said. It was that achingly familiar voice, and Crowley felt as though he was the one who’d been hit in the gut.

He hadn’t heard that voice since 1862. It wasn’t as if 52 years was even that long, really, not weighed out against millennia. There must have been times when they’d spent this long apart, he just couldn’t remember ever feeling so sick with it.

Or maybe he was just going mad, staying in this place, following vague orders from hell about making things worse, and instead just watching men tear each other apart with their ingenious machines. He’d already got a commendation for the chlorine gas the Germans had used at Ypres. Wasn’t that a nice joke. Another thing they’d invented all by themselves, those lovely, terrible humans. Another thing he took credit for, because he was a demon.

“What the deuce is happening, man?” That was one of the officers, one of the ones with a double-barrel surname, a thick moustache, and an accent so posh it probably went to Eton on its own.

“Some of the jerries are calling for a truce, just for today. A Christmas miracle,” the other voice said, the burn of it solid in Crowley’s chest, where his heart probably was. He didn’t know if he had one or not, but it still hurt. “Here, have some of this. They’ve sent over a whole wagon.”

Double rations of rum, no doubt, as that was what they’d decided the men really needed. At least it disguised the taste of the tea, which was brewed in the same pots as the bully beef stew, so it all tasted the same - beefy tea or tea-flavoured stew.

Crowley sat, looking at Smith’s breathing, his face pale but his chest rising and falling smoothly. He willed himself to get up, to walk out. He could picture the angel now, dressed in the same dull green as everyone else, perhaps with the white armband and Red Cross of an army medic, his cap tucked under his arm. The sun was out now, and his hair would be glowing far whiter than it should. He would be the brightest thing on the battlefield. The brightest thing in the world.

“Damn irregular this,” the officer grumbled.

“I think the men need it, sir,” Aziraphale replied, with more than a hint of suggestion in his voice.

“Yes, of course,” the officer said in the slightly dazed tones of someone hit by the angelic power of compulsion.

“They’re good men,” Aziraphale continued, and even at a distance Crowley knew it was true, believed it wholeheartedly. They were all good men, even the ones who beat their children or stole from their mates or committed any of a thousand other sins.

He didn’t let himself wonder why that angelic power wasn’t being used in war-rooms in London and Germany, why Aziraphale wasn’t whispering messages of peace and the inherent goodness of mankind in the ears of Kaiser Willhelm or the fools in the British High Command.

“It’s Christmas Day, what better day for peace.”

Across no-man’s-land, there was yelling, and some of the men were calling back from their side.

“English, English, don’t shoot!” Crowley heard someone shout out, and there was laughter.

“I’ll be getting on then,” he heard the angel say, and at that Crowley stood up and walked out of the RAP.

He saw the back of Aziraphale’s fair head moving down the trench and he followed, ignoring something the officer said behind him, and then turned down where the trench forked, and turned again, but Aziraphale was gone.

Crowley could find him, if he wanted to. He could reach out and locate him and go to him like a damned pigeon flying to home. Always trying to get home, never quite reaching it. But he then didn’t want to talk about what their sides were doing or not in the war. He didn’t want to see the radiant surprise in Aziraphale’s eyes turn sour, because that was how it would go, because that’s how it always went.

“Did you hear about the truce?” A man said, running past breathlessly, and Crowley said something pointless to his back and leaned himself against the sandbags, and wiped his hand under his glasses.

The toe of his boot nudged something in the mud and whatever it was glinted dully through the muck. He leaned over and touched it and then dug it out.

It was the lighter.

He passed his hands over it and the lighter was suddenly clean and polished and looked as good as it had the day he’d opened the box, silver and gold shining in the morning light, and he turned it to see the message and run his thumb over the words.

The tiniest scrap of evidence.

He put it back in his pocket and walked back down the trench to the sound of men singing.

*The RAP or Regimental Aid Post was the first step in the chain of evacuation for wounded soldiers in WW1.


End file.
